VAN Magazine

AI is everywhere in Bayreuth. When I go to the coffee shop on Sophienstraße, there are AI portraits of Richard Wagner wearing bad emo eyeliner on the walls. On my way to the Festspielhaus, there are AI posters for what can only be described as a “dinosaur rodeo.” AI-generated signs litter the streets—for breakfast, for […]

I was 15 the first time I went to Le Poisson Rouge. I was in New York on vacation from Canada, and a concert listing for the Kronos Quartet caught my eye. I had grown up on their recordings of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Morton Feldman, but to see the group up close, in […]

About a month ago, opera lovers in São Paulo were in dismay. Rumor had it that the upcoming production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo was canceled. When that was confirmed by a post from the director Felipe Hirsch, a frequent collaborator of the opera house, my phone melted with […]

Let me tell you a story.  No, let me show you one. No, again: let me sew you one. So you won, says the boy to the ocean who laps at his castle of sand; never mind, I will build it again. So they dance, this pair of unlikeliest lovers, always different and every time […]

There is a phrase in new music—the colloquial kind, one of those oral indexes traded among colleagues in post-show chatter and off-hand remarking, a shorthand signifier loosely comprehensible but sparingly specific—that goes: “This is a music that teaches you how to listen to it.” Implied in the phrase, though never said outright, is a patience […]